As Spotify launched its IPO, CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek appeared for a rare TV interview in the US. Here are the key points from the CBS This Morning appearance…
Just the beginning…
“As someone growing up in a working class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn’t afford all the music. So, back in ‘98, ‘99, I was really thinking about how I could get all that music, do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist, and that’s where the idea of Spotify came up. So we’re now like a decade into that journey, and I really just feel like we’re in the second inning. I feel like we are in the early days, not celebrating the end days, as so many other companies are doing.”
Driving music consumption…
“Well the interesting thing is that when you have all the world’s music in your pocket, you start to listen to a lot more music than you ever did before, by a lot more artists than you ever did before, in very different moments of time. If you take New Yorkers for example, it turns out the No.1 time that New Yorkers listen to music is between 10pm and 11pm even on weekdays. It’s really the city that never sleeps.”
Playlists are the future…
“That’s the interesting thing. That’s whether you are in your car, or your home, or whether you are at the gym, and that’s the other thing that is really different about how consumers start doing this, they’re really going for gym playlists, they’re going for barbecue playlists, and really setting different moods and moments."
Not worrying about the competition…
“Well, the funny thing is, when you have something like music that billions of people around the world care about, you’re never going to be alone. It’s too big, and it matters to too many people. So when we’ve got competition, it actually grows the market, because now more people are talking about streaming. It’s easy to forget that just three years ago, even in the US, streaming wasn’t really a thing. It was still downloading songs. So this helps educate the market, and that’s equally true across the world.”
Not even Apple Music in the US…
“We are about twice the size of them, so I think we’ve still got some room. I’m very happy with the growth that we are seeing in our business. I can’t speak for them but I’m feeling very comfortable.”
Falling out with Taylor Swift (she’s now back on Spotify)…
“It was slightly more complicated than that. For me, I should’ve done a much better job communicating this, so I take full ownership for doing that.”
Is he the saviour of the music industry?
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t really focus on that. I just focus on getting more people to listen to music than ever before.”
By Allison Miller
